Having just run a number of spy ops in FFA I've come to the conclusion that low spal countries have it too easy in succeeding with non-harmful spy ops against high spal countries.

My test countries both had 0 spy tech and were
Country A 560knw, 6k spies on 2k acres = 3 SPAL
Country B 638knw, 194k spies on 2.4k acres = 80 SPAL

I ran about 20 normal spy ops from country A on country B and had 3 successful ops.

I just tried again, with changing country A to have the same nw and land but with 7k spies... with 15 ops there were 3 successes.

This seems to be too many to me. I would have thought that (with similar size and nw) determining success should be (largley) based on difference in SPAL.

It's difficult to tell, but it looks like success rate (similar nw and size) is something close to yourSPAL^0.5 / enemySPAL^0.5 = 20%

Success rate should be closer to yourSPAL^0.75 / enemySPAL^0.75 = 9% or lower.

Someone with 3 SPAL v 80 SPAL should not succeed with so many non-harmful spy ops. (I know the success rate for harmful spy ops is lower).

The sample size is kinda small, I'd repeat the experiment a few more times before drawing conclusions.

hmm... thing is, I tried this before and had similar rates of success, though I wasn't diligent at recording the info (was on my phone)

Just tried 100 ops using similar nw/sized countries that had similar SPAL differences as above... Managed to get 7 ops through - which is more like it.

I hate to admit it but I could have been wrong. dammit.

Why would the formula be of the form (yourSPAL / enemySPAL) ^ C? That would give countries with better SPAL a 100% chance of success.

It wouldn't give better SPAL 100% chance of success, but it would be closer to 100% than what I experienced.

As Uber Bu said, the sample size was too small. The formula wouldn't have to be of that form. After my first set of tests the success rate seemed to be at 20%. With the networth and land size being the same it seemed that yourSPAL^0.5/enemySPAL^0.5 was an ok fit.

This rate of 20% seemed to be way too high for such a large difference in SPAL. If I were running non-harmful spy ops from the 80 SPAL v 3 SPAL I would expect almost 100% success. Certainly I would expect at least 90% or greater success. Really I expect a lot closer to 96%, ie (80-3)/80. Conversely I would expect 4% sucess for the 3SPAL country running ops on 80 SPAL. Perhaps it is like this but with my small sample size it appeared to be different.

I guess I'm just a little frustrated that I've currently got a country that has twice the number of spies (with pretty reasonable intel allies) and high spy tech on smaller land than 2 countries (which have very little spy tech) that have attacked me and I see no failed spy ops from them. So they were lucky I guess.